Original Letter

France

3rd November 1917

My Dearest Maidie:–

The mail has just arrived and I got one letter which will hold me one while. You were all alone on the 28th when you wrote me that letter and you wanted me. If there was ever any place where I wanted to be badly it was in that little bureau with you and your dogs and your fire on the 28th. There was the place – there is the place I should be – with you loving you and looking after you laughing with you and being amused by you. But I’m here, helas! Yioux Yioux is some kind of a dog and I think that his biting Marisot’s fleas is the supreme feat in love making. In the last camp we had a dog – a stray fox terrier – a female who had been led astray – erred – come to us for a day and a night. But evidently she didn’t consider the atmosphere healthy or conditions right for
her threatened family because she left us. Florence was the name we gave her and she amused us for 24 hours.

To s’afternoon Turkey and I are taking a half holiday. We are going to town – only a mile away and we are going to carouse on eggs and chips and beer. So the programme goes at present. We are shined up to the last notch and all on edge with the idea of a holiday. The town isn’t very big but that doesn’t matter and we do not need to be back until eight.

I never did tell you about all the grand clothes we got after our bath the day we moved. Two pairs of drawers two under shirts a Cardigan two pairs of socks and a shirt. All grand and new and the underwear is great not too heavy or woolly. Of course we had to pack it all but that didn’t matter – or doesn’t now.

Baby I love you to-day just as much as you love me. At least as much as I can and you know that is a very great deal. I am just wild about you Sweetheart and every bit of me just strains to be with you. You are perfect, Maidie Dear, and it was a black day when I left you. I am suffering for it now anyway.

If I can I shall write you again to-night but there may be lots to do when we come home.

with all my love, Sweetheart

Your own

Ross

Turkey

About Sergeant Lawson Turcotte

A fellow NCO in Rossís battalion. Of all the men in the battalion, Turkey seems to have been the one Ross worked with most closely in the course of his duties.

town

bath

Note

Desmond Morton, in When Your Number’s Up, tells us that

Part of any rest was a bath parade, ideally once a week, sometimes only monthly. Facilities ranged from former breweries with open vats to the elegantly tiled minehead showers near Vimy Ridge [see Ross’s letter of Nov. 25, 1917] where the men were crowded three to a stall. Many baths were housed in prefabricated metal huts where the winter wind whistled and water froze on the duckboards. Rusty nozzles emitted a few minutes of warm water, stopped for men to soap themselves and gushed a few more minutes of cold water, leaving the shivering men to dry themselves with a dirty towel or a flannel shirttail. Medical officers insisted that hot showers would be “enervating.”

“Imagine a watering can with all the holes but three blocked up, spraying tepid water for three minutes in a room without doors or windows, and a cold windy day,” Garnet Durham explained. A detail of men could be processed in thirty minutes. They were soon lousy again. Most baths included a laundry where Belgian refugee women washed, sorted, and sometimes repaired socks, shirts, and underwear. Attendants tossed “clean” clothes to shivering soldiers as they emerged. Sharp-eyed soldiers spotted the larvae that remained in the seams of flannel shirts and woollen drawers. In 1918, when lice were finally identified as the carriers of trench fever, a pair of Canadian medical officers finally had their ideas on effective disinfection adopted, and both baths and disinfection improved.

Either Ross is not being completely frank with Mary or he was lucky, since he seems to have had more pleasant experiences with bathing than the average soldier as described by Morton.

Source: Desmond Morton, When Your Number’s Up: The Canadian Soldier in the First World War (Toronto: Random House, 1993), 145.

Reveille at 6.00 A.M. and Physical Training before breakfast. Usual training during the morning and L.A.R. and R.G. & bombing classes. Football matches in the afternoon. Band Concert in the afternoon...